Sound symbolism

  • Lammertink et al. (2016)
  • N papers = 11, N experiments = 44, N participants = 425
  • Bias to assume a non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning ("bouba-kiki effect") in forced-choice paradigms.
  • Curator is Sho Tsuji
  • Search Strategy: "We followed the PRISMA statement (Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altmann, & The PRISMA Group, 2009) for selecting and reporting on the studies to be included in our meta-analysis. We decided to include articles if they were assessing the on-line processing of sound-symbolically matching or mismatching sound-shape correspondences related to the bouba-kiki effect (thus, testing both ‘round’ and ‘spiky’ correspondences) in children up to and inclusive of the age of 3 years. ‘Matching’ responses refer to children’s responses to congruent sound-shape associations (round word+round object; spiky word+spiky object) and ‘mismatching’ responses refer to children’s responses to incongruent sound-shape associations (round word+spiky shape; spiky word+round shape), respectively. Since we were already aware of 10 published articles, conference presentations or conference proceedings papers that fit our inclusion criteria,and since we considered our strict inclusion this criteria to lead to a rather small selection of articles, we chose a seed strategy rather than a broad literature search. We began by assembling 4 key articles that fit the inclusion criteria (Asano et al., 2015; Maurer, Pathman & Mondloch, 2006; Ozturk, Krehm & Vouloumanos, 2012; Spector & Maurer, 2013) as well as two recent review papers on sound symbolism including infancy (Imai & Kita, 2014; Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015). For all of these articles, we screened all potentially relevant references cited in these articles as well as references citing these articles and ‘related articles’ on their title and abstracts on scholar.google.com. Additionally, we screened titles and abstracts of all articles that cited one of the 4 key articles mentioned above (Asano et al. 2015: 16 citations; Maurer et al. 2006: 241 citations; Ozturk et al. 2012: 54 citations and Spector and Maurer, 2013: 9 citations). This search did not lead to additional eligible articles. In addition, we were aware of 9 conference presentations or conference proceedings papers that fit our inclusion criteria and were not redundant with one of our seed articles, including three by the two first authors of the present article."
  • Systematic: yes

Maurer, D., Pathman, T., & Mondloch, C. J. (2006). The shape of boubas: sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science, 9(3), 316-322. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00495.x

Ozturk, O., Krehm, M.,& Vouloumanos, A. (2013). Sound symbolism in infancy:Evidence for Sound-Shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 173-186.

Spector, F., & Maurer, D. (2013) Early sound symbolism for vowel sounds. I-perception, 4, 239-241.

Fort, M., Weiss, A., Martin, A., & Peperkamp, S. (2013). Looking for the bouba-kiki effect in prelexical infants. In: S. Ouni, F. Berthommier & A. Jesse (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing. INRIA, 71-76. [show abstract]

Fort, M., Guevara-Rukoz, A., & Peperkamp, S. (2015). Looking for the bouba-kiki effect II: null results from 4-month-old French infants

Asano, M., Imai, M., Kita, S., Kitajo, K. Okada, H., & Thierry, G. (2015). Sound symbolism scaffolds language development in preverbal infants. Cortex 63. 196-205. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2014.08.025

Lammertink, I., Tsuji, S., Usen, van, K., & Fikkert, P. (unpublished). Sensitivity to the Bouba-kiki effect arises late in Dutch children: evidence from eye-tracking.

Imai, M., Miyazaki, M., Yeung, H. H., Hidaka, S., Kantartzis, K., Okada, H., & Kita, S. (2015). Sound Symbolism Facilitates Word Learning in 14-Month-Olds. PLoS One, 10(2): 30116494. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116494

Starr, A., & Brannon, E.M. (2012). Sound-shape congruency in preverbal infants. Poster presented at biennial meeting of the International Society for Infant studies. Minneapolis, MN.

Pejovic, J., Molnar, M., Yee, E. & Martin, M. (June 10-12, 2015). Development of the sound-shape correspondence effect. Poster presented at Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2015), Stockholm, Sweden.

Spector, F. (2009). The colours and shapes of the world: Testing predictions from synesthesia about the development of sensory associations (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.